The End of the World with Michael and Stu offentlig
[search 0]
Flere
Download appen!
show episodes
 
Artwork

1
The End of the World with Michael and Stu

The End of the World with Michael and Stu

Unsubscribe
Unsubscribe
Ugentligt
 
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
  continue reading
 
Loading …
show series
 
This week we are discussing avian flu and the possibility that it might be the next pandemic ahead of us, just over the horizon. We get into the history of influenza outbreaks originating in domesticated animals, such as, most famously, the so-called "Spanish flu" of 1918 in order to calibrate how potentially worrying such an outbreak could be shou…
  continue reading
 
This week we are covering the 2005 Spielberg/Cruise film War of the Worlds. Made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the film attempts to make some kind of connection between the H.G. Wells's classic story of alien invasion and the events that had so recently shaken the foundations of America...and it fails to do so, at least in a manner …
  continue reading
 
This week we are covering the COP29 climate conference which took place over the last two weeks in Baku, Azerbaijan. Have they solved the issue? Was this climate conference in actuality a "meet up" for lobbyists in the fossil fuel industry? What is the connection between climate change and social justice, and is this connection one of the reasons t…
  continue reading
 
This week we are discussing Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road. A bleak but simultaneously uplifting depiction of a journey through a world in which nature has been totally destroyed, the story offers glimmers of hope in spite of its incredibly grim setting. Themes of childhood, memory, dreaming, and perseverance even in the face of seemingly in…
  continue reading
 
This week we are talking about 2013's The Purge, a low budget high concept home invasion thriller directed by James DeMonaco. We discuss the Aristotelian overtones of the notion that an annual night of violence might allow for a cathartic experience that would help society to be more peaceful the rest of the time, while also exploring a few histori…
  continue reading
 
It's our election recap episode where we take accountability for our...mistaken belief that Harris would pull out a tight election, when, obviously...that did not happen. We discuss what went wrong for the Harris campaign, while analyzing what this outcome might bode for elections moving forward. Are we destined to just sink deeper and deeper into …
  continue reading
 
It's our election day special where we go out on a limb and predict who we think will triumph in the 2024 US presidential election. Is the seeming late swing to Harris real, and if it is real, will it be enough? Has Kill Tony doomed the Trump campaign with his offensive "comedy"? Has Ann Selzer, with whom we were all VERY familiar before this past …
  continue reading
 
We're back on our election beat, in this episode gaming out potential outcomes of the November 5th US presidential elections. What would happen if Trump wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college? What if Harris wins in a landslide? What if the electoral college comes out in a tie? We go through all of these scenarios and also look at so…
  continue reading
 
This week we are diving back into politics, looking at the platforms of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, paying particular attention to where each candidate stands on apocalypse-adjacent issues like climate change and military weaponry. The results of our investigation may surprise you! This episode is the first in a series we'll be doing as th…
  continue reading
 
In the second and final episode of our series on Atlantis we get into the modern vision of the mythical lost land, touching on such singular figures as Ignatius Donnelly, Madame Blavatsky, and Edgar Cayce. What was it about this ancient story from a minor Platonic dialogue that was so appealing to psychics, cranks, and charlatans of every variety, …
  continue reading
 
At long last we are covering one of the greatest apocalyptic narratives of them all! That's right, it's the Atlantis episode! And for a subject so massive, so important, we had to make it a two parter. In this first episode we will cover Plato's vision of Atlantis as presented in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. We also give a bit of background o…
  continue reading
 
This week we are covering the 1995 Wolfgang Petersen blockbuster Outbreak. Having lived through a pandemic of our own, can we glean new wisdom by revisiting this terrifying tale of an even-deadlier-than-Ebola virus set loose on a small Northern California town? Perhaps not, but it is still fun to examine the politics of this essentially liberal pos…
  continue reading
 
This week we're talking about James Cameron's 1984 masterpiece The Terminator. How relevant is this movie to our current fears about a potential future AI dystopia? How was such a tight, well-written film executed on such a comparatively small budget? How moving is the love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese? The answer to these questions an…
  continue reading
 
This week we are discussing the highs and lows of the September 10, 2024 Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. We get into where they stand on the issues, the depths to which the immigration debate has now plunged, and the utterly short shrift given to the question of climate change and the environment. Off the top, we also co…
  continue reading
 
This week we are discussing Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, a magical realist look at the realities of corporate exploitation in the developing world. By turns comedic and tragic, the book weaves together the lives of a number of characters in the manner of a Brazilian novela (akin to an American soap opera). It's a g…
  continue reading
 
We're turning back the clock to 2009 to discuss an epochal turning point in our society, namely, the Balloon Boy incident. While perhaps not as "earth shattering" as some of the other topics we've covered, we make the argument that this incident does mark an important turning point in the nature of media, in that it was one the last "crises" to occ…
  continue reading
 
This week we're covering the recently concluded DNC, noting the ways in which, despite the theme of "not going back," in many ways it feels as if the Democratic party has, in fact, gone back to previous eras of its strength, the Obama Era, the Clinton Era, and so forth. What does this nostalgic reversion bode for the potentially world ending phenom…
  continue reading
 
This episode is about the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried and preserved the Roman city of Pompeii as an example of a real world apocalyptic event. We go over the mechanics of what happened, relying on the account of Pliny the Younger. We also discuss what the most recent science has to say about the events as they unfolded before pivo…
  continue reading
 
We're journeying back to 1998 to consider one of the greatest of all cinematic masterpieces, Michael Bay's Armageddon. Along the way we point out a few of the more...improbable...scientific elements of the film, while also noting the remarkable way such an apocalyptic event was depicted in the less politically charged environment of its era. This i…
  continue reading
 
This week we're discussing Bertrand Bonello's 2023 filmThe Beast. Starring the brilliant Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, the movie is set in a not too distant future where AI rules human society and has deemed our petty, combustible emotions the enemy of productivity. Therefore, in order to advance in society, individuals must undergo a psycho-surgi…
  continue reading
 
This week we discuss the Democrats' strategy of calling their electoral opponents "weird" before plunging into a consideration of Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 dystopian masterpiece, Children of Men, paying particular attention to the analysis of Mark Fisher, as found in his landmark 2009 book, Capitalist Realism. Is this film, as Fisher suggests, an metap…
  continue reading
 
This week we are discussing Omar El Akkad's 2017 novel American War, which imagines a civil war in a future America driven by conflict over the continued use of fossil fuels. Charting the lives of the Chestnut family, the book paints a grim picture of the consequences of civil strife, reversing the polarity of past interventions by showing what it …
  continue reading
 
This week we spend the first twenty minutes of the show discussing the ramifications of the attempted assassination of former President Trump before diving into a consideration of the apocalyptic 2012 Phenomenon, with special attention paid to the 2009 blockbuster, Roland Emmerich's 2012. At the episode's conclusion we adroitly knit the two halves …
  continue reading
 
We follow up on the state of contemporary politics as covered in our last episode before turning back the clock to discuss one of the genuinely apocalyptic periods of the past, namely the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Does the sudden dissolution of several ancient Mediterranean societies have anything to teach us about our current situation? Who were t…
  continue reading
 
Election fever has gripped the United States and we are here to break it down, specifically the June 27, 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We discuss the debate itself briefly, but focus mostly on the aftermath, and what it bodes for the future of our republic. Topics covered include Donald Trump's (potentially disastrous) Project 202…
  continue reading
 
This week we're getting back into post-apocalyptic literature by considering a novel by legendary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, namely 2003's Oryx and Crake. Set in a world...surprisingly similar to our own, where bioengineering has become the dominate mode of technological progress, the book tracks three main characters, Jimmy (aka Snowman) and…
  continue reading
 
This week we're talking about Edgar Wright's 2013 film The World's End, a movie that explores the idea of severe arrested development in the context of a covert alien invasion. We also explore some unsettling news regarding a potential tsunami overwhelming the Pacific Northwest in the future, whether in two hundred hours or two hundred years, and w…
  continue reading
 
We're examining the recent "trend" of so-called "Last Chance Tourism" in this episode, which is when travelers seek out places or sites that are likely to be destroyed or rendered utterly unrecognizable in coming years as global warming takes its toll. We explore the paradoxes of this phenomenon, which claims to raise awareness and thus increase "a…
  continue reading
 
Plastic takes over the podcast! This week we go over some troubling news about the prevalence of microplastics in certain human organs before diving into a film about human organs that are able to digest plastics, namely David Cronenberg's 2022 movie Crimes of the Future. Is this dystopian depiction of human evolution relevant for changes we see cu…
  continue reading
 
This week we're discussing Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower, tracking how well this 1993 book predicted the world in which we now find ourselves. Is her vision of a violent, environmentally tormented, violence-ridden California really so far off? We also get into a couple of recent AI-related controversies regarding recent episode topic …
  continue reading
 
We're going into the marine depths of Yorgos Lanthimos's 2015 meditation on monogamy, The Lobster. What does this starkly delineated world of relationships have to say about our old more loosely defined world? Is our own society headed towards a similarly bleak status quo? We get into these questions and truly so much more! This episode contains sp…
  continue reading
 
This week we're getting into the many absurdities of 2013's Spike Jonze directed AI romcom, Her. We discuss the technical problems with the film's depiction of AI, plus Stu educates Michael on the particulars of the non-vol-cel community, which he has, for some reason, researched extensively. We also spend a few minutes off the top riffing on Jerry…
  continue reading
 
We're talking about Amazon Prime's new smash hit series Fallout. Along the way we touch on such subjects as Ridley Scott, 50's Nostalgia, Plato's Cave, Jerry Seinfeld's scintillating and brilliant new movie about snacks, as well as JRR Tolkien's alleged antipathy for Shakespeare. We also get into why this is such a successful adaptation of a video …
  continue reading
 
We're promoting Stu's new book, Fernsehturm Berlin, a mix of memoir, historical imagination, and chaotic rumination this week while also discussing the dreaded Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment in the Cold War that perhaps brought us closest to nuclear armageddon. Was Curtis LeMay correct in his estimation that the resolution of this conflict was "t…
  continue reading
 
We're back in the Alex Garland space, confronted, once again, by one of his ideology-free films. Civil War asks us to imagine an America that is UNDER SIEGE from internal forces...but does it, in any way, explain what is motivating those forces? Does the movie offer answers as to what might heal a similarly divided nation? Is the moral of the film …
  continue reading
 
Is the AI apocalypse coming soon? Will our large language model chat bots soon...take over the world? Has artificial general intelligence come to bury us and not to praise us? This week we're discussing Alex Garland's 2014 AI-Frankenstein-gothic-horror-sci-fi, Ex Machina, in the hopes of getting to the bottom of the above questions and oh so much m…
  continue reading
 
We discuss the recent NYC EARTHQUAKE and the vertiginous thrills and community-building possibilities implicit in moments of seeming crisis before diving deep into Netflix's new television program, 3 Body Problem. Have the team of Weiss and Benioff redeemed themselves after the legendarily poor reception of the final season of Game of Thrones? Are …
  continue reading
 
This week the pod is looking at a television program we love, the first season of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers. We get into themes of religion, madness, and bureaucracy and how they manifest in response to the rapture-like event depicted in the series. Is the "sudden departure" more similar to perennial pod topics 9/11 or the pan…
  continue reading
 
It's Dune season and the pod is talking all things Arrakis. Covering both parts of Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation, this episode explores various themes: resource management, intelligence agency witchcraft, the dangers of messianism, Frank Herbert's complicated politics, ecology, the rivalry of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the despicableness of…
  continue reading
 
In this episode the pod plunges into the depths of Adam McKay's 2021 satire Don't Look Up. Is it the contemporary equivalent to the keen and biting satire of Dr. Strangelove? Does its central analogy between a comet strike and climate change make any sense at all? Is this the most annoying movie ever made? Plus we get into the (potential) end of a …
  continue reading
 
Michael and Stu discuss Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Are the concerns of this film relevant to a contemporary audience? Have we left the frightening world of nuclear apocalypse behind? Were our childhoods shaped, in various ways, by the terrifying vision of this film? Do …
  continue reading
 
Michael and Stu discuss apocalyptic themes in Mary Shelley's genre-inventing science fiction classic, Frankenstein. Are we, as a society, on the verge of being overrun by monsters of our own making? Can we see Victor Frankenstein's creation as a metaphor for any of our current predicaments? Is Frankenstein's Monster the first emo kid? The answers t…
  continue reading
 
In this episode we explore Kevin Costner's two 1990's post-apocalyptic outings, WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN. Are they any good? No. Do they have an important message? Also no. But do they reveal something about what the apocalypse meant to mass culture in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War? You'll have to listen to find out! Spo…
  continue reading
 
Michael and Stu dig into Davis Guggenheim's 2006 Al Gore-centric exploration of climate change, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Has its truth become any more convenient? And what are we to make of its mercurial protagonist, the one-time future President of the United States? Answers to these questions and so much more can be found...in this very episode! Se…
  continue reading
 
Michael and Stu discuss the pop culture phenomenon that is 2023's THE LAST OF US. Apocalyptic thinking INVADES prestige television drama and NOTHING will ever be the same. Send us a text https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu…
  continue reading
 
Loading …

Hurtig referencevejledning